The 1990's decade has been marked by a societal technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. This advance has been even further accelerated by the extensive consumer and business involvement in the Internet over the past two years. As a result of these changes, it seems as if virtually all aspects of human endeavor in the industrialized world requires human-computer interfaces. As a result of these profound changes, there is a need to make computer directed activities accessible to a substantial portion of the world's population, which, up to a year or two ago, was computer-illiterate or, at best, computer indifferent. In order for the vast computer supported market places to continue and be commercially productive, it will be necessary for a large segment of computer indifferent consumers to be involved in computer interfaces. Thus, the challenge of our technology is to create interfaces to computers which are as close to the real world as possible.
It is well known to connect a plurality of computer systems into a network of computer systems. In this way the collective resources available within the network may be shared among users, thus allowing each connected user to enjoy resources which would not be economically feasible to provide to each user individually. With the growth of the Internet, sharing of computer resources has been brought to a much wider audience; it has become a cultural medium in today's society for both information and entertainment. Government agencies employ Internet sites for a variety of informational purposes. For many companies, their Internet sites are an integral part of their business; they are frequently mentioned in their companies's TV, radio and print advertising.
The WEB is the Internet's multimedia information retrieval system. It is the most commonly used method of transferring data in the Internet environment. Additional methods include the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher. Client machines accomplish transactions to the Web servers using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is a known application protocol providing users access to files (e.g. text, graphics, images, sound and video) using a standard page description language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML provides basic document formatting and allows the developer to specify “links” to other servers and files. The Internet paradigm, a network path to a server, is identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) having a special syntax for defining a network connection.
Retrieval of information is generally achieved by use of a HTML compatible “Browser”, e.g., Netscape Navigator™, at a client's machine. When the user of the browser specifies a link via a URL, the client issues a request to a naming service to map a host name in the URL to a particular Internet Protocol (IP) address at which the server is located. The naming service returns a list of one or more IP addresses that can respond to the request. Using one of the IP addresses, the browser establishes a connection to a server. If the server is available, it returns a document or other object formatted according to HTML.
One of the most common and frequently one of the most disappointing activities performed on the Internet is searching among a plethora of information available at various Web servers for the particular information in which the user is interested. There are a variety of research engines available including the search engine with the trademark ALTA VISTA™, the search engine with the trademark LYCOS™ and the search engine with the trademark HOTBOT™, as well as various search engines attached to the individual Web servers themselves.
One of the difficulties is that the formation of a search argument is a difficult task for many users. The quality of the search is thus dependent upon the skill and vocabulary of the user. In many cases, even with such mastery it is difficult to properly anticipate the exact words which will be used by the writers of a particular document. The addition of a thesaurus would be helpful, but in many cases the vocabulary is technical or specialized and would simply not be found in a general purpose thesaurus. The result of much of an Internet search could most charitably be called “useless”. Yet among this useless information, there are generally some pearls. The user, upon reading such a document, recognizes its worth to his desires and wishes, typically futile, that he could have more documents like this. He could manually look at the document and attempt to formulate a new search using new words in the desired document. The new search might be better or similarly dismal to the first.
It would be preferable to provide a user a convenient means to quickly refine an Internet search with a minimum of manual search formulation and keyboard input. This present invention addresses this point.